Assumptions and Limitations

There is an underlying assumption in design thinking that it is impossible to collect reliable data about what customers will want in the future. Let’s take the example of a consumer tech company that aims to go to market in a couple of years with an innovative tech gadget. The marketing department of the tech company might do a large-scale survey among its customer base, asking respondents what features of their current devices they like & dislike, and what kind of gadgets are missing in the market. The company spends two years and millions of euros to develop a fully functional prototype of the product that, according to the results, should be most desirable. They then give the product to some of the customers they had initially surveyed, and they answer: “Now that I see it, I changed my mind. I would actually not buy this.” All the R&D money just went out of the window.

Had the company adopted a design thinking approach, they would have built rudimentary, cheap, quick prototypes and shown them to potential customers. According to their feedback, they would have adjusted the prototypes and repeated the process many times. They would have failed faster and succeeded sooner, as David Kelley (one of the founders of the dSchool) likes to say.

While in quantitative marketing research outliers usually are deleted from a data set, design thinking takes interest in so-called “extreme users”. That is because solving an issue for an outlier might lead to radical innovation and uncover entirely new customer segments.

With the increasing popularity of the process, some skepticism has also arisen. Critiques find fault with its vague and broad definition, lack of a published scientific framework, and oversimplification of the design process. Indeed, design thinking should not be regarded as a one-size-fits-all recipe for guaranteed innovation. Design thinking does not make more traditional customer-facing processes in organisations (such as quantitative marketing research), which are often based on scientifically validated methodologies, obsolete. Instead, it complements them with some fresh and novel insights. Sticking with the marketing example, one insight would be, for example, that you should not look at your customer base merely as quantitative data, but as users with needs, tasks, goals, and dreams.

Being familiar with the process, of course, does not qualify you as a trained designer. But that is also not what design thinking claims to achieve. The core message of the approach is this: design is more than just an afterthought - it should be considered at every stage of a development process. The tools we expose you to at ETH Week are meant to convey this message and increase your creative confidence. Design is everywhere. And that means that everyone, including you, should dare to be creative.